FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT GITA - PAGE 2

NEW DELHI: Faced with swirling attack from Opposition on a range of controversies, the government today put up a brave front, saying it was totally focused on development for all sections and that undue importance has been given to issues like conversion and celebration of good governance day. Strongly defending the government, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said it was wrong to say that governance has been overshadowed by controversies...

NEW DELHI: Congress today hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his dig at "secular friends" saying that the comments made on foreign soil was "shocking and ungracious" and had made India a "laughing stock" in Japan. "Shocking & unbecoming of a Prime Minister to mock secularism on foreign soil, when communal temperatures raised by his own party in India," Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha said in a tweet. Not mincing words, he said Modi was "beating the communal drum-beat in Japan" and the "mocking" of a serious issue of secularism is "ungracious, unacceptable, unexpected".

It's believed engineers generally become less people-oriented because they are always dealing with objects, systems, machines, tools, etc. Engineers have worked wonders and have created marvels. Take the case of Mr E Sridharan who has, by his apt planning, sincerity and dedication, made the dream of Delhi Metro Rail come true. The actions of Sridharan fits in very well with the well known and commonly quoted verse of Gita (2.47) "Your right is to work only, perform your work only and not at all to its fruit, let not the fruit of action be your motive nor let your attachment be to inaction.

NEW DELHI: Spiritual channels are going live ? no, the gods haven't been captured on camera yet, but appearances of Sai Baba and live discourses of Brahmakumaris from Mt Abu will now be telecast live, thanks to new aggression in content aggregation by Jagran, the 24-hour religious channel from the Zee stable . It has also tied up with T-Series for exclusive access to the latter's programming. The latest fare on religious channels is designed to draw youth. While the religious channels dispense "Indian" (read Hindu)

Seventy years ago this month, US President Franklin Roosevelt officially approved the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer was made its laboratory director. Four years later, they succeeded in test-detonating the world's first nuclear device, leading Oppenheimer, who had read the Gita, to famously quote Krishna, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. " What was he thinking? For one thing, his sentiments weren't so deep that they prevented him from taking up his post at the project unlike others who refused to work on weapons of mass destruction on moral grounds.

By: Devdutt Pattanaik One of the most famous lines in the Gita is: Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kada chan, in which Krishna tells Arjuna to focus on actions and not on the results. This instruction seems simple enough but it becomes very difficult to implement in corporations where the whole focus in the target and the task. Business begins by visualizing the phala or fruit. And then one figures out way of planting the bija or seed. We call this outcome-based management, which can be seen as the very opposite of the lines in the Gita.

WASHINGTON: Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and her Democratic congressional colleague Dr Ami Bera have been sworn in for their second consecutive term in the US House of Representatives. Gabbard, the first ever Hindu lawmaker, took her oath on Gita as the 114th session of the US Congress began yesterday. She was administered the oath of office by the Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner. Two years ago, she had taken her oath on Gita too, which she presented to the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi , when she met him in New York last September.

WASHINGTON: Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard , the first ever Hindu elected to the US House of Representatives, has been called for active duty by the National Guard for which she is a reservist to help with a volcanic eruption in her native Hawaii. "Gabbard has been called up for activation by the Hawaii Army National Guard to support their assistance to Hawaii County's response to the ongoing Kilauea lava flow," her spokesperson Heather Fluit said in a statement yesterday. Gabbard, who is seeking re-election, will begin her active duty from today as she joins about 80 National Guard soldiers and airmen already on the ground.

In The Drunkard's Walk, his meditation on the role randomness plays in our lives, physicist Leonard Mlodinow talks about chanciness. As a teenager, he watched the flames of the Sabbath candles flickering randomly. Could their shapes be predicted with the right kind of equation, he wondered. His father disagreed, citing his experience in the Buchenwald Nazi camp which illustrated life's fundamental unpredictability. Arrested by the Gestapo and send to the death camp during World War II, he starved for days on end, and stole a single loaf from the bakery inside the death camp.

One of the signs in a seeker, pursuing the objective of 'victory over oneself', is contentment (santushta). The great Tamil saint Avvaiyar observes that the mind which says to itself, 'enough', is the best healer. Nevertheless, it could also be argued that such 'resting on one's oars' could result in lack of that needed 'killer instinct'. The two apparently divergent views, as above, could be reconciled by comprehending particular messages, which, when applied, would indicate the right approach, as applicable to each aspirant.